turn off content match
turn off advanced match
and then i get decent results

but their system is slow and drives me nuts - so i spend very little time there rolling out succesful campaigns / keywords from G that I know work also.

hope their overhaul doesn't get delayed further

My strategy has recently evolved to playing the long tail of keywords and ignoring the the well-trafficked & higher priced keywords. This strategy has evolved because the combination of high traffic and high price presents an obvious and worthwhile target to the click fraudsters that over-populate the Overture network.

This is a sad state of affairs for advertisers, searchers as well as Overture. Nevertheless, there are plenty of keywords associated with most goods and services that do attract qualified parties. The challenge is to build a solid inventory of relevant keywords, monitor referral traffic and eliminate keywords that appear to attract the bogus click throughs.

Of course, the impact of all this is that YSM takes more management overhead and produces far fewer results - everything you have to factor into your ROI. Ultimately, your participation has to be evaluated against other third tier programs.

If I didn't get a good recturn from YSM then I wouldn't use them. However, I don't always bid for the top spots, I always make sure that the keywords are in the title and the description. I also use as many long tail keywords as I can find as they are cheaper and convert well.

How do you turn off content match? I thought standard match was supposed to do that.

You can do it at the account level (my personal preference) by logging in, lower right you'll see Account Status box, near the bottom it'll have "Content Match TM:" set to ON. Click the ON to be taken to the page where you account wide settings are located and it's obvious setting there.

On the keyword level (or category of keywords), under "Manage Content Match" tab, you can also reduce your bid to a very low level (doesn't turn it off, just turns it way down) or chose to take them offline for Content Match.

If you set the account setting to kill it, you don't need to mess with the categories / keyword listings.

thanks for all your feedback!

Only been with Yahoo for a week or so, but so far the ROI is similar to Google. The upside of the perceived difficulty of Yahoo is the reduced competion. An ad that gets 3% ctr in ninth position is hitting 15% in third for the same price. :)

Very good results on YSM.

I get decent ROI on Overture simply by turning off content match and broad match. But the unwiedly interface and 3-5 day turnaround for ad approval puts me off expanding, so my Overture spend is miniscule next to my AdWords spend.

for us its a cycle. One day content sells better, the next search etc

I have been able to get some very good results in YSM since June this year. I have been getting well over 120% roi with my limited number of keywords.

After reading posts from just last month, you would think that YSM is rampantly corrupt and will practically be out of business tomorrow.
Could more people respond with a realistic perspective on the state of affairs over there?

I'm about to jump back into an old Overture account, which I was looking forward too (minus slow approvals and their crummy admin)...
but I totally didn't expect to see what's been raved about on here for the last few months!

I understand to turn off Advanced (phew, thanks for that one!) and Content Match...
but is it even worth the effort to start this account up again?

I have $1800 sitting in the account from way back...
I also aksed (and have been approved for) for a bulk upload due to the spend the account used to do.
But now I'm thinking about asking for that money refunded and dumping it into G...which is my primary advertiser anyway.

Any suggestions?

My market is "tshirts" and "artwork"...
which isn't exactly the high value "insurance" or "hosting" keywords.

But damn...sure seems like Yahoo has blown it.
All the while Google is kicking Arbitrage out and simply throwing millions of dollars away.

What a contrast.

Just wanted to say that from the other side of the fence so to speak, from displaying Overture PPC adverts on some of our sites that the descriptions you use are highly relevent to how well you do. I know thats the obvious, but you would be amazed at the differance it can make.

On a couple of our larger sites we display the top 5 Overture ads for the keywords and im often amazed that the site visitors often dont click on the number one spot despite it being the most dominant.

On one day i noticed from the stats that the position 4 was getting almost 70% of the days traffic!, when i looked at the advert i could see that it was worded very well compared to the three above it and site visitors who are often lazy anyway were clicking on it because it looked like it was going to be the best result. If this site was in position 1 i doubt it would have had much more of the traffic but it would have cost them 4 times as much!

When i buy in traffic now for other sites i will play with the wording of the title a few times in position 3/4 maximise the clicks and i dont go higher. I guess a lot will depend on your keywords and your competing sites but overall the description and title of you advert play a very important roll when it comes to establishing your ROI from advertising.

Hope this post is of interest

RichTC, I assume that you mean you are part of the Yahoo publisher network. I don't know how that works, but if it works anything like Google's adsense, then that means advertisers on Overture have little control over where their ads get displayed. Which is why the ad text may or may not seem well written or relevant to you: the reason is the advertiser has no clue what the content on your page is.

Also, position number 1 does not pay 4 times as much as position number 4. It may be only a $0.03 difference between first and fourth position.

Hipsoul - you can get really good ROI on YSM but you have to watch your account like its a newborn baby, otherwise it will eat all your money.

I just turned off several categories that have been doing terrible recently. They have keywords that get clicked on a lot from search partner sites which may explain why.

Im gonna stick with my small group of keywords that have proven to do well over time and just simply not expand my YSM campaign.

I wouldn't suggest to automatically turn off advanced and content networks for new campaigns.

For one of my campaigns I turned them off to see if I could get a better ROI. All I got was less traffic and same ROI. So I found for this particular site/market the expanded network accounted for about 50% of my total clicks, and these clicks converted no worse.

I suggest doing some testing before shunning all those clicks right away.

YSM works better for my company than G. Not bashing G at all. From what I've read most people have better results with google than yahoo. This just is not true with me. My cost per conversion on yahoo is about $10.00, and considering and average order from us is $200, thats not bad. We get about 20 conversions a day from YSM and about 2 a week from G for our small niche market business. YSM gives me a better result.

We only have 1 competitor in the US and they haven't even learned about the internet yet. So I'm also not competing against anyone when they search for my widgets. Of course there are other ads above or below me in the sponsored listing, but they are normally not relevent.

We have dozens of clients making good ROI on Yahoo, and whose aggregate spend is well over $5M/mo.

The ROI is out there...

-Shorebreak

Since Yahoo updated their algorithm my ROI with YSM has doubled what it was over a year ago when I tried it. Even when my site was in the #1 position for over a year(during which time I halted YSM) I didn't see this ROI from Yahoo because my competitors were all around me in the natural listings. Now the natural listings are in dire straights and I decided to test YSM again and to my amazement my ROI doubled! Thank god for horrendous natural results!